Centennial Speakers Series features guest speakers, authors, panel discussions and a LearnFest '16 Symposium on teaching and learning. These community wide events will feature individuals whose passion and expertise align with our mission.

J.R. Ward is a #1 New York Times bestselling author with more than 15 million novels in print published in 25 different countries around the world. A graduate of Smith College, she currentlylives in Kentucky where she has learned to enjoy and appreciate all things Southern. Prior to becoming an expat Yankee, she worked as a lawyer in Boston and spent many years as the Chief of Staff of one of Harvard’s world-renowned academic medical centers.

Carmichael’s Bookstore will be selling copies of the book prior to the book signing after the event.

Emily Bingham will be speaking about her newest book, Irrepressible: The Jazz Age Life of Henrietta Bingham.Bingham is an acclaimed historian, and in Irrepressible, she has produced a sparkling, colorful, and psychologically nuanced biography of her deliberately forgotten great-aunt: the Jazz Age character, privileged southern debutante, consort of the Bloomsbury group, and 1920 Collegiate alum Henrietta Bingham. While at Collegiate, Henrietta was a basketball star, won the essay prize, wrote for the student newspaper and had the distinction of being among the first students to enter Collegiate 100 years ago in the Fall of 1915.

Emily Bingham is also the author of Mordecai: An Early American Family and the coeditor of The Southern Agrarians and the New Deal: Essays After "I'll Take My Stand." She earned a PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and frequently teaches at Centre College. She lives with her family in Louisville, Kentucky.

Jane Metcalfe is an entrepreneur, board member, advisor, and investor. As the cofounder and former President of Wired Ventures Inc, she and her partner Louis Rossetto created a diversified media company whose businesses included Wired Magazine (U.S., U.K., and Japanese editions), Wired Digital, including the search engine HotBot, and Wired Books. More recently, Ms Metcalfe was the President of TCHO Chocolate, a craft maker of super premium chocolate, whose mission is centered on teaching cocoa farmers how to make better beans so TCHO can make exquisite chocolate for consumers and food professionals. Since 2000, she has been a partner at Força da Imaginaçao, a business whose advisory and investment activities include media, technology, real estate and food companies.

Current and previous board seats include Wired Ventures, TCHO Ventures, the UC Berkeley Foundation, the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Expression Center for New Media, One Economy, ZeroOne, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Ms. Metcalfe graduated with honors from the University of Colorado with a degree in International Relations.

She was also the 2009 Distinguished Alumni Award winner at Collegiate.